


It's All Fun & Games...

by theclaravoyant



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, HuntingBird, Huntingbird Secret Valentine
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 09:16:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9714851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/pseuds/theclaravoyant
Summary: Try though he might, that wasn’t going to stop her killing him.(Proverbially, of course.)(Probably.)-Prompt: how did the 'don't die out there' tradition start?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AchillesMonkey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AchillesMonkey/gifts).



> Prompt: how did the 'don't die out there' tradition start?
> 
> I tossed up soooooo many ideas for this - from the angsty to the downright ridiculous. Hopefully I worked it all into a suitable mix of flirty, funny, and serious, as befitting these two great Agents of Shield. I hope you like it!

The fire escape cluttered and clanked, and the hunter breathed heavily as she ran down it, leaping steps and sliding down ladders like the rust and grime were nothing. All subtlety had been abandoned in a last-ditch effort to reach her prey. She threw herself over the railing of the last landing, planning to cushion herself with his back, but he had already moved away. She rolled instead, but by the time she had righted herself, her target had disappeared.

“Damn it.”

She raked a hand through long blonde hair, glad at least that she hadn’t bloodied herself up in the process of achieving so little. A pounding heart and light sweat were all she’d suffered.

Well, that and a blown cover, she was reminded as raucous laughter made itself heard from the inside of the pub. She could hear his voice above it all, obnoxious and sharply different from the rest with its foreign tang. He was pretending to be more drunk than he actually was, probably trying to distract everybody from what had just gone down in there. Trying to distract them from the fact that he’d blown her cover and set an assassin – or two, depending on how one thought about it – loose on them all.

Try though he might, that wasn’t going to stop her killing him.

(Proverbially, of course.)

(Probably.)

Bobbi Morse ground her teeth together, checked herself over for overt signs of a ruffling, and checked that her weapons remained sufficiently hidden. Then she waited for the opportune moment to duck back out onto the street and back through the front entrance of the bar.

She threw the door open with decisive force, and her keen eyes sought out the obnoxious voice. Its owner was sitting on a bench at the back of the place, near the galley and restrooms. He wore army-surplus cargo pants and boots and a leather jacket, and sat with his legs casually apart, arms flying, gesturing with a beer-bottle this way and that and swaying for good measure, loudly regaling an old army story to the two guys standing in front of him. He was doing well, too, until – through the carefully arranged gap in his audience members, Bobbi noticed – he spotted her. And the fire in her eyes. And the very obvious bone she had to pick: she wouldn’t have come back here if she’d got her man.

Hunter laughed loudly and stumbled a little as he slid himself off the bench. The two men protested with indistinguishable groans and Hunter waved them off.

“Oi, I gotta take a piss aye?” he insisted, and staggered drunkenly around the corner. Bobbi, still grinding her teeth, slipped and smiled and sidled her way through the crowd and after him as quickly as she dared, and when she reached the internal alleyway with the bathrooms and storerooms, found that he may have been killing two birds with one stone.

Or maybe he had just been taking a piss, as he left the men’s toilets with a jovial step and seemed genuinely surprised when Bobbi grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the wall.

“Hey, love,” he rasped, still not quite recovered from the shock, or the terror that came from staring a highly trained Shield assassin in the face. “You wanna buy me a drink first?”

“You know who that was?” Bobbi hissed, because of course he did, because this useless merc had been after him too. “The Ghost. Do you know why they call him ‘The Ghost’?”

Hunter shrugged as best he could. “Because of his eerily fair complexion?”

Bobbi’s eyes narrowed. Hunter smiled innocently and raised his hands as if in confusion. Bobbi sighed and let him go, stepping back.

“Go die in a hole, mercenary,” she hissed.

“I could say the same to you, G-man,” Hunter returned sharply. “Or do you prefer G-woman? G-person?”

Bobbi clenched her fist. She’d barely felt skin press against skin and her fist was already flying through the air, already hitting, like fly against a windscreen. Not out of control, simply acting on a combination of desire and instinct. The mercenary yelped, clutching at his nose as blood started to pour.

“Oi!” he cried indignantly. “What’d you do that for?”

“Fun,” Bobbi replied, because ‘seething rage’ and ‘years of research and months of labour wasted’ didn’t feel like snappy enough answers. It was surprisingly cleansing, though. She left him feeling smug, listening to him fume behind her, and walked straight back through the bar and out onto the street like no-one could touch her, leaving him to make his explanations alone.

-

_We’ve decided to team up._

After that, Bobbi had groaned internally for a good five minutes as she’d listened to Hartley give them the run-down on their new team dynamics. In all honesty, Bobbi had never really been one for working in a team. As part of one? Sure. But she was not exactly the most social, emotionally available person. Not many in this job were though, she supposed, and that was a comfort. Sometimes.

Then she saw his face. Her heart seemed to rise and drop at once. It was a curious feeling, especially since last time she’d seen him, she’d had nothing but contempt for him. This time it was like dread and excitement at once. It was uncomfortable.

He offered his hand.

“Lance Hunter. Shameless mercenary. At your service.”

So he did recognise her. With narrow eyes and a narrower smile, Bobbi shook his offered hand.

“You two know each other?” Hartley wondered.

“We’ve met,” Bobbi said cryptically. Hartley frowned. Cryptic had never worked on her.

“She was my…impromptu surgeon,” Hunter filled in. Bobbi couldn’t help a flicker of confusion cross her expression, and she caught him smile a little at her slip before clarifying: “She helped me achieve these rugged good looks.”

He gestured to his face and Hartley snorted.

“This is gonna be fun,” she muttered, and strode out of the room wondering what exactly she’d gotten herself into.

Bobbi glared. Hunter glared. Idaho, another new recruit, lingered awkwardly in the background for a while and then slipped out after Hartley, unsure where all this glaring was going to end up.

“Go to hell,” Bobbi hissed.

“Ladies first.”

Hunter pulled open the door and bowed. Keeping her chin high and her jaw clenched, Bobbi followed Hartley and Idaho out, but she was acutely aware of her heart in her throat, and she could feel Hunter’s smug smile behind her like eyes on the back of her neck.

-

The impromptu team lasted longer than any of them had foreseen, and over time, the seething rage between Bobbi and Hunter transformed into begrudging respect - and after that, eventually, not even begrudging. Hunter may have been a mercenary, but he risked a little more when innocent lives were at stake, and when agents died in the line of duty, he laid off the GI jokes until most of the pain had passed. And Bobbi – she was an Agent serving forces higher than herself, but not blindly. She asked questions, she demanded justification. She did all the things Hunter had started to believe servants of those mysterious alphabet agencies never did, and even though sometimes she made the hard call anyway, it affected her like he hadn’t thought it would affect the coldhearted human weapons he had once imagined.

Still, neither of them really liked to acknowledge the ease of the partnership into which they had fallen. Most of the time, they didn’t even notice it themselves. They jostled and fought each other out of habit and stubbornness, and somehow, in secret, cursing each other out became banter – almost a ritual – almost a good luck charm.

-

“Break a leg!” Hunter farewelled cheerfully.

Bobbi gave him a smile as tight as her dress, and adjusted her microphone one last time. The music began, and she strutted out onto stage, glistening in blue and silver and an obscene amount of glitter.

Hunter looked down at the spy they had just taken down; as tall and lanky as Bobbi, she was obviously going to be a struggle to shift, but there wasn’t much time, he guessed, before somebody else would come along. He examined the space he had, and the angle at which she was lying, and wondered if maybe he was going to be the one to break something instead.

-

Plates and glasses smashed, chairs screeched and flew, and bodies tumbled over, under and against each other in a tangle of fists, knees, batons. Hunter dove at their last opponent’s knees, knocking him sideways, and then slammed a tray over his head, knocking him out. Knees still on the unconscious man’s chest, Hunter looked back over his shoulder at Bobbi, who was standing with her fists wrapped around her batons, ready to strike.

“Getting slow on me?” Hunter teased as Bobbi evaluated their situation and dropped out of her warrior stance, kneeling by another fallen enemy operative to check their pulse.

“Get bent,” she snapped.

“If you insist.”

Hunter grinned, until a baton spun narrowly past his head. He ducked, and yelped indignantly, and Bobbi smiled to herself.

-

 _Six hours,_ she reminded herself. _You have to spend six hours with him. In … that._

Bobbi tried not to screw up her nose as she studied Hunter’s car. A jeep, with a thin layer of fast food wrappers visible through the windshield across the dash.

“Come on, then, we haven’t got all day.”

He pulled the door open, glaring at her, daring her to say something and in her stubbornness, she refused. She waited for him to brush an old French fry off her seat and sat down, trying not to squirm. She’d been in considerably more gross siuations of course, but when more was at stake it was easier to put aside the smell of stale chips and…old mayonnaise?

“Such a gentleman.”

Hunter snorted, and Bobbi pressed her lips together.

 _Six hours,_ she reminded herself.

_Old mayo. Off milk?_

As Hunter pulled onto the main road, Bobbi eyed a container in the drink holder of her passenger-side door. A fast-food cup. She didn’t want to look in there. She really didn’t want to – Nope, she wasn’t going to do that. Six hours. Six hours.

“Is there something…growing, in this?”

Hunter slapped his hands on the steering wheel and rolled his eyes.

“Two minutes! _Two minutes?_ That’s a record, even for you.”

“Well excuse me for being reluctant to spend a whole day in this health-hazard of a crap-pile –“

“- grateful we don’t have to _walk_ the whole bloody way –“

“-such a thing as trains!”  
  
“Oh because _urine_ would be better??”  
  
“Urine that doesn’t have mold in it, sure!”

“You wanna walk then? Hm? Go on then –“

Hunter leaned over and flicked the door handle, then pushed the door open across her. Bobbi grabbed the seat and the door handle tightly, pulling it closed as he tried to keep it open, struggling to lean so far over and keep them on the road at the same time.

Police sirens started up behind them and Hunter swore and sat upright.

“Shit,” he hissed.

“Shit!” Bobbi covered her mouth. She couldn’t help laughing. It was inappropriate timing but she couldn’t help it, as Hunter had no choice now but to speed up. They couldn’t afford to be caught, sighted, registered, nothing. “Why do they even have police out here anyway? Who are we gonna kill? Corn?”

“Got any ideas about how to lose them?” Hunter concentrated twice as hard on the road, as cornfields whipped past and the road became disturbingly potholed and unsteady.

“Drive into the corn?” Bobbi suggested.

It was a joke, but it was the only thing they could really do, unless they intended to drive until the cops got bored, which was unlikely to happen at this point.

Bobbi cursed and reached out for balance as Hunter slammed the brakes on and sent the car spinning. He caught control of it soon enough though and began accelerating, backwards, at the cornfield.

“Hunter!” Bobbi shrieked. “You’re gonna kill us both!”

“That’s the plan,” Hunter muttered, biting his lip in determination. Bobbi couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. She had no choice but to roll with it either way, to wait until the car stopped and then jump out quick-smart. She grabbed the bag full of their cash and IDs and abandoned everything else, disappearing into the crops.

Once they were far enough away, they stopped to catch their breath. Hunter glanced back over their shoulder.

“Zombie apocalypse,” he said, chest heaving, as if that were some sort of explanation. Bobbi frowned.

“What?”

“In a zombie apocalypse, you’ve gotta drive backwards over the zombies so they don’t wreck your engine.”

“…Right.”

Hunter nodded, and continued his march into the corn with his head held high and his weapon at the ready, as if it was a forest on a foreign tundra with enemy agents waiting in the shadows and not – well, a cornfield. Bobbi rolled her eyes.

“Alright, Spooky Mulder,” she muttered. “Lead the way.”

-

(Almost.)

Because as it turned out, Hunter had been right to stay on edge. For all the farce of driving the car ass-first into acres of corn, there was very real danger about. They were on mission, but not for a formal agency, which was why they couldn’t afford to be caught – by the cops, or by anyone else. It was also why they couldn’t rely on backup, even when they realised they’d walked into a trap.

Literally.

A steel clamp snapped shut on Hunter’s leg and he dropped his rifle immediately, crying out in pain. Bobbi raised her weapon in case there was anyone around, but it was just Hunter, struggling to stand in such a way that wouldn’t strain the wound. After a quick scout, Bobbi knelt down and assessed the injury. His muscle was bitten through; all but shredded. He’d be lucky to stand after this, let alone run – and that was even if she could figure out how to get him out.

“The bloody cops,” Hunter spat, his eyes prickling with tears of agony. Already it felt like the trap might as well have just bitten his leg clean off. He didn’t want to look, which was fortunate, since at least one of them had to keep an eye on their surroundings. “I should’ve seen something coming.”

“And if we’d stopped,” Bobbi pointed out, “the ‘cops’ would have turned out to be fake and would have drugged or killed us. You made a good call.”

Hunter swore as Bobbi touched his bloody flesh. It didn’t feel like a good call, in any way, and it was starting to feel less and less like one by the second as in the distance, the corn began to move, parting and folding in a telltale indication of rapidly approaching people.

“Bobbi!” Hunter insisted, gritting his teeth against the pain as he tried to pull Bobbi back to standing. “Someone’s coming, you’ve got to go!”

“No, I’m not leaving you!”

“You have to! We don’t know who this is or what they’ve got with them, and I can’t fight for shit right now. Run, and maybe they’ll let you get far enough away if they’ve got me.”

“Hunter.” She took his hand, the one he was using to try and shoo her away. Why? The significance of the words she’d blurted out before _– I’m not leaving you_ – suddenly bit into her consciousness, and slowly sank in as Hunter renewed his desperate pushes.

“I can’t help you!” he insisted. “And they’ll hear us if we keep this up. Please, Bob! Go! I’ll get out if I can and find you at the next place. Someone’s gotta tell Hartley and Idaho we found them. It’s noble and all but you know we can’t afford this.”

“I don’t want to,” Bobbi insisted, her eyes filling with tears that she couldn’t control. “I –“

“Bobbi.” Hunter’s voice was quiet and trembling, dangerously close to losing its courage. “Don’t say anything either of us are going to regret right now.”

Bobbi pressed her lips closed and nodded. She tightened her fist around the strap of their bag of cash and ID, and checked her grip on the pistol she’d been sporting. She had precious few seconds left before she had to run, and she didn’t want to waste them. After every injury and menace, every curse, every piece of bad luck she’d wished upon this man over the years, she couldn’t leave him without one last thing. But what?

Hunter smiled, and with their joined hands, pushed her away. She moved away uncertainly. Maybe she could fight them after all? It was very close quarters. How many were there? Could she take them?

No, Hunter had made their decision and he was right. For Hartley and Idaho’s sake, if nothing else, they couldn’t risk it.

“Hey, Bob,” Hunter murmured, before she could get too far away. She glanced back, hopeful, almost wishing that he would ask her to stay. But he didn’t.

“Don’t die out there, alright?” he said. “We didn’t come this far to have you walk into one of these bloody things too.”

She nodded, a promise.

“You too,” she said. And then she ran.

-

The stakes were high, and Bobbi spent the next few hours on high alert. She walked for miles until she found a payphone by the side of the road, called Hartley and Idaho to tell them the news, and then set herself in the nearest no-questions-asked motel she could find. She contemplated having a shower, but a lack of questions about a mysterious lone woman and a large suspicious bag was, as per usual, accompanied by an equal or greater lack of hygienic or remotely pleasant facilities. No matter, it just made it easier to get back to the task at hand: rescuing Hunter.

Bobbi set out her assets on her bed. Both their IDs, which they couldn’t use anywhere overtly legal. Someone carding them for alcohol or sharps might not report them but a police station? An airport? Definitely out. So she couldn’t report Hunter missing. Hartley and Idaho were out of the country, and with such an unpredictable, under-researched opponent in play, Bobbi couldn’t be sure what Hunter may or may not face in the time it would take them to get here. She’d have to go it alone. And that would take smarts.

Fortunately, Bobbi had those in spades. And a large bag of cash, which she used to purchase some garden-variety house and garden products that corroded, exploded, or burned themselves and everything around them when mixed together. She also bought herself some thick oak dowel – not the greatest weapon, but a relatively inconspicuous one still sure to help her knock people’s knees out. By the following night, she was ready. Armed with her assembled weaponry, Bobbi went to the farmhouse at the cornfields and wreaked a level of hell only a one-woman show bringing down a thirty-man operation could.

She didn’t bring them down exactly - more like sent them scurrying away like rats – but for now it was good enough for her. It would give them an insight into the operation and, more importantly, it left her way open for Hunter.

Bobbi found him in the basement. He was tied to a chair and bloodied up, but nothing too creative had occurred. They’d even made a half-assed job of wrapping his leg – albeit if it was only to stop him losing consciousness. When Bobbi approached, Hunter moved at last, coughing and spluttering and gasping for air.

“Bobbi?” he wondered, peering up at her through tired and swollen eyes.

“Hunter!” Bobbi fell to her knees in front of him, working quickly at his ties. A knot in her stomach seemed to undo itself as the ropes fell away from him.

“Where are Hartley and Idaho?”

“On the plane. They’re landing in six hours.”

“What – you came here by yourself?”

“I had to.”

“Why?”

Bobbi blanked. Hunter’s face, though battered, was open and earnest. Desperate, aching for an answer. Could she give it to him? Would he understand simple terms of loyalty and camaraderie, the fact that they were fellow soldiers; brothers in arms? Possibly. But was that really the reason? Because it had never really felt like brothers-in-arms between them – and increasingly, recently, it had felt very distinctly like something else altogether.

 _Don’t say anything we’ll regret,_ he’d said. He must have felt it too.

Bobbi swallowed. Hard.

“Because I – I miss your stupid mushrooms. And your stupid face. And I don’t want to be stuck in this hellhole forever alone and I don’t wanna tell Hartley you died coz she’d kill me. Alright?”

It wasn’t exactly untrue, but it wasn’t as true as it felt when she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face into his shoulder. He had on that familiar leather jacket – probably the same one as the day they’d first met, by some miracle. It was filthy, probably torn. And his face smudged blood and grime onto hers. But it was the truest, most open, most mutually understood feeling. It was like someone had physically opened her heart, and let something out that she hadn’t realised she’d been holding onto.

“Am I to understand,” Hunter checked, “you busted up 20 guys because you missed my mushroom soup?”

Bobbi squeezed her hold until he squeaked.

“I’m a highly trained Agent and spy, mercenary,” she growled. “I’ll rescue who I like.”

Hunter lifted a hand and rested it against her back. They sat for a long moment like that, in mutually relieved silence. And then Hunter spoke.

“You _like_ me.”


End file.
